


A Day in the Life

by StarlightDragon



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Arguing, Canon Compliant, Canon Continuation, Established Relationship, Fluff and Angst, Future Fic, Human Castiel, M/M, Men of Letters Bunker, Old Married Couple, Retired Hunter Dean, Retirement, Sappy Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-15
Updated: 2016-09-15
Packaged: 2018-08-15 04:53:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8043283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StarlightDragon/pseuds/StarlightDragon
Summary: After over twenty years together, Dean and Cas find themselves fighting about the little things more often than they used to.





	A Day in the Life

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SammySammyDean](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SammySammyDean/gifts).



> So I promised Samm a birthday present 100 million years ago and I am so so sorry this is late but this is for you I love you a lot
> 
> also this is based off the tags on this post: http://casandsip.tumblr.com/post/146917298676/novaks-old-married-couple-i-want-a-fic-where  
> which come courtesy of **wordssometimesfail.tumblr.com**

"Seriously? Again?"

Castiel frowned. "It's not like we have anything to do today, Dean."

Dean buried himself under the blankets. "Then maybe you should set the alarm for later instead of pretending to yourself that you're gonna get up early and then hitting snooze a million fucking times."

"I feel more well rested this way. I get to fall asleep over and over again. Why is that so difficult for you to see, Dean?"

Dean groaned. "Yeah, well. That's not exactly your call, is it, considering you're not the only one sleeping here. And haven't been for over twenty years."

"Has it really been only twenty years? I feel like I've suffered through an eternity of you complaining about my sleeping habits.

It really had been twenty years, give or take, since Dean had first made his way down the hallway to Castiel's bedroom in a late night moment of weakness. For a while he'd tried to pretend it wasn't happening (even to himself) but when Sam, Gabriel, Charlie, Kevin, Claire, and countless witnesses on random hunts had commented on what a cute couple the two of them were, it became impossible to deny any further. The two of them had moved into the same room, officially and permanently, and a small, private ceremony had followed not too long after, leaving nothing changed except for the fact that both of them now wore a thin gold band on one finger. They'd gone on fewer and fewer hunts, and even though it had never been officially discussed, Dean supposed that they had retired.

But one of the hardest things to get used to was the fact that Cas was human, and that meant he needed sleep. And his sleeping habits were one of the most frustrating things Dean had ever suffered through.

He stretched, shielding his eyes from "I'm too old for this shit. I'm gonna go back to sleep for the ten minutes or whatever I get before your alarm goes off. Yet. Again."

"You could just get up, you know. You don't have to wait for me."

Dean had no response to that logic, so he just let out a huge, fake snore.

\--

The thing was, if his sleeping habits were the only frustrating thing about Castiel, Dean wouldn't have minded. But there was so much crap that Dean had to put up with these days, stuff that he'd never had to deal with back when Cas was an angel. When the two of them did finally get up, Dean feeling like he'd barely slept because of all the rude awakenings, they made their way through to the kitchen to make breakfast. Dean opened the fridge and grabbed the milk, finding the bottle completely empty.

"What the hell, Cas?" He was too tired to shout, so he just sighed, banging his head against the fridge door.

"Dean, you've been in hell. This isn't hell. This is an empty bottle of milk." Cas had never truly gotten over his literal phase.

"Yeah, and it's an empty bottle of milk that could have been avoided if you'd gone to the fucking store! Or even just mentioned to me that we'd run out, not put it back in the fridge and acted like everything was normal!"

"I see, because everything in this house is my responsibility now." Cas rolled his eyes, longsuffering, and sat down at the table, waiting for Dean to finish cooking his breakfast. Dean snorted at the irony.

\--

After breakfast, Dean stood up and checked the calendar on the wall. "Shit," he muttered under his breath.

"What's wrong now?" Cas asked in a sarcastic tone that was accompanied by an exaggerated eyeroll.

Dean had to take a few deep breaths to stop himself from snapping at his husband. "Claire and Alex are visiting tomorrow. For a week. Any chance you could head out to the store and do a supply run, get some decent food in? I know you still don't eat anything but microwave burritos and takeout cheeseburgers, but when we've got guests coming I like to have some actual food in, you know?"

"Then maybe you should buy it yourself," Castiel suggested, pulling out his phone and opening up Doodle Jump.

"I have to wash the dishes, all you're doing is playing shitty phone games. Do you actually expect me to do everything round here?"

Cas nodded and said, as though it was obvious, "Yes. You know I pulled you out of Hell once? You owe me."

"Cas, it's been almost thirty y-- you know what, never mind." Dean shook his head. There was no point even arguing with the former angel when he started playing the 'raised from perdition' card, which he did annoyingly often to get out of doing literally anything he didn't want to do. By this point, Dean was beginning to wish that the dude had never bothered.

\--

"You're always complaining at me for everything I do, but you're not exactly so perfect yourself, Dean Winchester!" Castiel shouted. Dean screwed up his face. His hearing wasn't what it once was, and Cas' shouting was hurting his ears.

"Dude. I literally just got home." Dean dropped his plastic bags full of groceries onto the kitchen counter - the ones that he'd had to carry all by himself, despite how much it hurt his arms, because of course Castiel hadn't come out to help him carry things from the car.

Cas tutted. "Yes, and you forgot to turn the stove off when you were cooking bacon. The bunker could have gone up in flames, Dean. We could have died, Dean. Then where the hell would we be?"

Dean stared at him, and was hit with the sudden urge to pull a tomato out of his bag of groceries and throw it as Castiel's fucking selfrighteous face. Apparently Dean needed to transfer over the title of the Righteous Man. "Can you stop being a fucking drama queen for five minutes? We've got smoke detectors for a reason. Yeah, I messed up, but maybe that's because I was so tired because someone kept waking me up with their ridiculously early alarms."

"Just be more careful, Dean," Cas instructed, before sticking his nose in the air and striding out of the room.

\--

"And another thing!"

Dean had barely had two minutes of peace and quiet to stack his groceries neatly in the fridge before Cas showed up again, looming over him.

"What is it now, Cas?"

"You said you were tired because of my alarms, but you're not the only one who struggles to sleep! I'm a patient man-" Dean snorted at this- "and so I tried not to mention anything, but you, Dean Winchester, hog the covers worse than anyone I've ever met in my life."

"And how would you know that?" Dean scoffed. "How many other people have you shared beds with, exactly?"

"Angels just know these things, Dean," Cas said in a condescending tone.

"I call bullshit." Dean rolled his eyes. The truth was, he knew he hogged the covers, he knew he woke up in the middle of the night all the time and saw Cas shivering, barely holding onto a corner, while he, Dean, was wrapped up like a burrito. But he didn't like the way Cas was talking, so he fought it anyway. "Besides. You're not even an angel."

It was a low blow and Dean knew it, but he could still tell that the hurt expression on Castiel's face was fake.

"That was completely unnecessary, Dean, you know that-"

"Whatever. You finish putting these groceries away, even though your system's shit. I'm going to work on the damn car."

\--

"You know, maybe just for once you could actually ask me what I want to watch on Netflix, right?"

Dean flopped down on the couch next to his husband, pulling a face at the show on the screen. Two men were staring lovingly into each other's eyes the way Sam had accused him and Cas of doing for years before they actually ended up getting together. Then, one of the men on screen muttered something about some game being 'on' before turning and running away, his coat swooshing out behind him. Dean had no idea what was going on, and he didn't care to find out.

"Dean, I was here first. Maybe if you spent less time trying to fix that old car of yours and more time with your husband, you'd be here when I put the TV on and I'd give you a choice in what we watched. As it stands, I'm not stopping this show halfway through for you."

Dean pulled his face at the dude with the curly hair who looked like he thought he was too cool for his own good. "You at least wanna catch me up on what's going on here? Or, you know, what the show's called?"

"Sssh, Dean. I'm trying to pay attention," Cas waved a hand in his direction, leaning forward in his seat and staring intently at the screen, which was apparently more interesting than Dean himself.

Dean sighed and grabbed a newspaper from the table. He knew it was important to Cas to keep all the pages in order, so he purposefully pulled them apart, shuffling them around as he looked for the cartoons. Cas either didn't notice or ignored him, but Dean was sure that it would start another fight later, and he smirked to himself in satisfaction.

\--

"Stop that."

"I'm tapping my fucking leg. Let me live, Cas."

"And I'm asking you to stop."

"I wasn't even in the same room as you."

"I could hear you from the other room. It was distracting."

"Then go somewhere else. It ain't like I'm doing it on purpose."

"This is my house too, you know."

"And it's my damn leg."

\--

They didn't speak to each other for the rest of the day. There was just no point, Dean thought. Of course he wanted to be with his husband, but when Cas was acting like this, he wasn't particularly good company. Dean walked around with a heaviness in his chest that just refused to settle, everything he did that tiny bit more difficult, because there was that insistent reminder in the back of his head that Cas was mad at him. And he couldn't make that go away.

He did some work out in the garden, because the house felt stifling, even though it was actually far hotter outside. He came back in and hid in the library for a while, figuring that was the one place that Cas was pretty much guaranteed not to look for him. And even when he started to get tired, he put off going to bed, scared that he and Cas were just going to end up getting into another fight.

It was only when he jolted back to consciousness after almost falling asleep with his head pillowed on his arms that he realized he had no choice but to head into the bedroom. He could have slept on the couch, but that would have bewn hell on his back, and he had to think about such things these days.

He hoped that Cas would already be asleep, but as he approached the room, he saw a soft glow creeping out from the crack between the door and the floor. Dean opened the door as slowly and quietly as he could, not wanting to startle Cas or provoke him again.

But once the door was opened fully, his eyes fell on something he didn't expect.

Castiel was tucked up in his side of the bed, his knees drawn into his chest, the bedsheets snug around his waist. He wore a soft blue plaid nightshirt with sleeves that were just a little too long for him, drooping over the hands that were holding his book. Dean thought that it might have originally been his shirt, though after so many years together, it was sometimes difficult to remember. Cas' reading glasses were perched on his nose, and there was a crinkle in his forehead as he leaned forward to focus on the small text in front of him. The nightlight on his bedside table caught on his hair, making it sparkle almost like a halo.

"Cas..." Dean breathed.

Cas glanced up at Dean in surprise. He clearly hadn't heard him come in.

"My God, I can't believe you're mine," Dean whispered, shaking his head, a huge smile spreading over his face.

Cas just stared at Dean and raised an eyebrow. "Quiet, Dean, we've been together for twenty years. I would hope that you can believe it by now."

Usually Dean would have felt annoyed that Cas wasn't letting him talk, but tonight, he didn't. He just stripped off his pants and socks, climbing into bed next to and sinking into the bed next to Cas with a soft groan.

"No, listen to me. I know we've been fighting a lot, but... there's nobody I'd rather fight with, you know? I'd rather be here, arguing with you about - about who left their socks in the dryer, or whose turn it is to set the table for dinner - than with somebody else, you know, not arguing," Dean attempted to explain, taking a deep breath as the words poured out, the words he should tell Cas a lot more often. "Cause at the end of the day, no matter what happens between you and me, I know we'll get to sleep next to each other, and everything'll be okay. And that's all I need. And I'm glad, every day, that it's you and not anyone else."

Cas closed his book and placed it on the side table. "I feel the same way, Dean. I know it can be hard for me to match up to some of the things I have done for you in the past, but I appreciate you just as much as I ever did. You know that I found being human difficult, at first. You made it easier. You still do, despite my complaints, and I would never want to be without you."

Dean blushed. Cas wasn't supposed to retort. He definitely wasn't supposed to still make him blush at this age, was he? But Dean found he didn't mind it as much as he expected.

"I love you, Cas. I mean it, more than anything. Thanks for still being here all these years later. And cause I never said it enough, thanks for saving me from Hell."

And a cranky old human Castiel waved a hand away casually and beamed, as he curled up around his husband and replied, "Any time, Dean."

**Author's Note:**

> I attempt to run a functional blog about castiel over at **casandsip.tumblr.com** \- feel free to talk to me there!!


End file.
